In its origins, religion is innately hostile to the extension of impersonal causation to the cosmos, for the obvious reason that such a conception conflicts with the operation of special agency. Religion begins with the postulation of powerful agents whom man can placate. Up to the present, the evolution of religion has not involved a withdrawal of this primary assumption but only its ethical refinement and the reduction of the number of agents. In the Western world, at least, religion and the idea of an ethical control of the course of nature have been inseparable. This latter idea underlies prayer for material blessings, miracles, and the various conceptions of providence. Can this primary assumption be taken from religion without destroying it? {114} The difficulties which confront this assumption for the educated man of to-day must not blind us to its naturalness in the past. But that is the very point to grasp. The primitive view of the world is not being so much refuted as outgrown. Slowly and painfully, man has learned that events are conditioned by antecedents of an inflexible character, and that his wishes and desires must have hands and feet working for them before they can affect things. He has bettered his condition through invention and discovery and social organization. Of course, the world might have been different, and moral categories might have been the proper ones to apply to nature; but the brute fact of the case is that our particular universe is not of that sort. Once given the notion of superhuman agents of a social character, the after-development of religion is inevitable. Man adopts toward them the attitude that he takes toward his own rulers. To pray to the gods is as natural as to pray to those who have power and who, we hope, may be moved by our prayers. Psychologically, there is no difference in the attitude involved. Providence is merely the action of an agent who is more than human. For primitive man it did not imply an intervention with nature, for the very good reason that the gods were active in nature. Nature was the sphere of the activities of the gods in the same way that it was, in a minor degree, the sphere of the activity of men. We must rid ourselves of the modern conception, nourished by science, of nature as a realm of causal relations. For ages, man had no such conception; all activities were thought of as acts. Nature, man and the gods acted together in a sort of social whole. Law, as we understand the term in science, would have had no {115} meaning to primitive man just as it has little meaning for many at the present day.